Meetings, meetings

Today's Countdown 2020 meeting was held in City Hall, conveniently in a room just along the corridor from my usual work place. We were given an update on work in progress in Castle Street, St Mary Street and on the bus station Central Square. The re-paving work has brought considerable congestion to the city centre day after day for months. All are agreed it will look great when it's finished, but it reall is a case of 'no pain no gain'. 

There was a brief respite over the Ryder Cup weekend, when road works were suspended to convey half a good impression to VIP Castle visitors. The work force from Castle Street was shifted to St Mary Street for the duration, so that job is ahead of schedule. The race is on to complete as much of the planned re-paving as possible before the Christmas light switch-on starts the annual influx of extra shoppers into town day after day. It has to be done in streets already congested with traffic and pedestrians. 

There's more work to come in the New Year around the station and the south end of St Mary Street, not to mention poor old Westgate Street, in a lamentable state, but plans and preparations depend on the outcome of a WAG consultation about  Central Square, because it's a regional transport hub. Nothing can be decided for certain until this exercise is finished and has made its report. You'd think it would be possible for national and local government to harmonise their efforts to ensure a smooth, efficient work-flow to benefit the city-going public, but communication between over-sized bureaucracies is never their best achievement.

I worked through the afternoon until it was time to walk over to City Church for my first meeting of the committee of CACEC (Cardiff Adult Christian Education Centre), to review and plan course arrangements for the next eighteen months. Until recently some of its courses were accredited by Cardiff University, but as part of its cut-backs in Life Long Learning, this facility has been withdrawn. The social component of the University's output, so difficult to quantify in cost benefit benefit analysis, has been scaled back to enable more pursuit of sponsorship and grants from industry. The commodification of higher education continues apace. I believe we shall live to rue the day. 

The committee agreed to make an approach to the UCW Lampeter, whose faculty of theology is getting a new lease of life due to its union with the Bangor theology faculty in the new Trinity University College of West Wales. Lampeter has strong community educational roots, not least because of its role in training people for ministry. It will be interesting to see what kind of response is received.